15 years ago, the NSA spied on World of Warcraft — but did a leak change anything?

polygon.com:

It sounds like the plot of a Bush-era young-adult spy thriller: as millions of players raided their way through Azeroth from 2006 to at least 2013, Western intelligence agencies like the NSA and the British Government Communications Headquarters were working out ways to surveil and build informant networks to keep tabs on suspected Islamic extremists in World of Warcraft.

WoW wasn’t the NSA’s only target: Together with GCHQ, the NSA also turned its eye toward social MMO Second Life, Microsoft’s original Xbox Live chat service, and other popular “Games and Virtual Environments.”

We know this today because of former NSA contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden, who worked with newspapers The Guardian and The New York Times, as well as investigative nonprofit ProPublica, to release a trove of classified documents from the agency in 2013.

According to the leaked documents, MMOs were fertile grounds for exploitation along both signals intelligence and human intelligence lines. In one such document, GCHQ claimed that it had found clear evidence of suspected terrorists logging into WoW and Second Life, correlating usernames and IP addresses to targets, and according to the joint news report, the British spy agency had even used an informant in Second Life to bust an online crime ring.

At the time, the story was a bombshell, prompting companies like Linden Lab, the maker of Second Life, and Blizzard, the developer of World of Warcraft, to deny that any government surveillance was happening with their knowledge.

Looking back on this story almost a decade later, three questions remained unclear: How did the NSA do it? Why did it care? And what did it accomplish?

The story of NSA analysts snooping on Alliance guild meetings